It's that time of year again, when our web pages, print pages, and email boxes fill up with lists of predictions for the year ahead. There has been no shortage of cloud computing, big data and digital business predictions for the year ahead, and many of them are really compelling. As in years past, rather than add another list to the public discourse, here's my one simple prediction for cloud in the year ahead.
In the year ahead, 2016, cloud will solidify its emerging role as an innovation machine. We'll see a solidification of cloud computing's role as a gateway to new things -- and not just as the latest IT strategy, or as a cost-containment mechanism. Thanks to cloud, there will be many things people will be able to do that they simply couldn't do before. They will be able to experiment, to test, and to pull data and applications from many sources. As IBM's Robert LeBlanc put it on these pages a couple of months back: "The cloud is creating a foundation for a flexible assembly model, not only to tap into past tech investments that organizations have made, but also to enable them to transform their business models quickly."
One area where cloud really is laying the groundwork for innovation is in the Internet of Things space -- which represents the cutting edge of innovation at this time. Let's face it, without cloud, there would be no IoT, just a bunch of Things.
This innovation is in evidence in the various testbed projects that have been launched over the past year by the Industrial Internet Consortium. In my work with Real-Time Insights (RTInsights.com), I had the opportunity to speak with some of the people behind the various testbed projects, which are creating new ways of digitizing things that once seemed impossible to digitize.
For example, earlier this year, I talked about one testbed project that I called the "Internet of Tools." The effort, being spearheaded by Bosch, Tech Mahindra and Cisco under the aegis of IIC, is outfitting production-floor tools, such as nutrunners and other power tools used to drill, tighten, measure and solder into an overall system of networked tools, with sensors. With connected tools,it's possible to achieve precision in operations where precision means everything -- such as aircraft manufacturing. In aircraft construction, there are thousands of bolts that must be tightened and precisely documented. “We are able to record the torque used to tighten hundreds of thousands of bolts, for example, and store that information in a database,” Dirk Slama, project manager at Bosch explained. “The information makes it possible to quickly identify any discrepancies and it provides users with clues as to the possible causes of faults.”
Product design is another area ripe for innovation, and cloud is playing a big role here as well. undefinedAutodesk, for one, just launched an initiative it calls it calls its future of making things (FOMT) strategy. As documented by PJ Jakovljevic in TechnologyEvaluation.com, the vendor is creating a connected cloud product development community of manufacturers to help them "seamlessly extend work on industrial and mechanical design to the design of electronics, integration of sensors, software design, and prototyping via a connected ecosystem of services and applications." Developments with 3D printing and laser and plasma material surfacing, as well as the Internet of Things, means increasing digitization of many processes, and cloud is bringing it all together.
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Consider as well the innovation possibilities in another sector normally resistant to innovation: healthcare. Cloud-based innovation is changing this. For example, look at the work of Medidata, a provider of cloud-based solutions for clinical research in life sciences. The company offers what it calls a "Clinical Cloud" that promotes innovation for drug and research companies that supports more than 10,000 clinical studies, 370,000 investigational sites and more than 2.7 million trial volunteers. The company's goal is to transform and vastly accelerate the often laborious process of clinical trial design and execution.
The innovation possibilities go on and on, across all industries and organization types. With cloud as the foundation, innovation can be accomplished rapidly, and at little cost. And remember, the best innovation comes out of numerous and profound failures. Digitally, it costs very little to fail. It may sound funny to say, but cloud makes that necessary platform for failure possible.
(Disclosure: I am a regular contributor to RTInsights.com, mentioned in this post.)
